Elizabeth Bishop's School

...this little filling station Dirty and humane, with its wicker sofa, a dirty dog, a taboret and "a big hirsute begonia...

...Nearly always the shock, which is the delight, derives from just the sweetness of the unexpected "naturalness" or homeliness of the comparison...

...e., the organization of off-beat, penetrating insightsbut it remains, like all original things, inimitable...

...Now often an extraordinary brightness and exactness of detail can suggest a hallucinatory light of an intensity verging on the over-extreme...

...The point is that it is also done by an askance way, a studied casualness, by a kind of indirection...

...One may talk or not about the, as it were, methodi...

...Elizabeth Bishop subscribes to no schools Dr theories, though you might say that she is a school in herself of the schooled diction, the schooled eye...

...and just as all his analogies depend on the most directly home-style stuff when "the river makes that sound/ Like a primus pumped up high," so even in his passion for the river that "lies across the earth/ and sucks it like a child," he is specific, he is moderate...

...All the dross, the machinery, the dead lumber to do with getting on with a story or managing transitions have been expertly bypassed...

...In a sense she takes no chances and yet by her raffish connections she is of the sort to take every chance...

...Her disconnections are a part of her "connections...

...The tide is higher or lower...

...You see how the "magic" is directly natural...

...Such substantiality and veracity has a thinginess, a hardiness and hardihood peculiar to Bishop, which makes her single of her kind in nailing what gets seen into the reader...

...As if every detail had been engraved and is about to be on your own skin of memory too...

...and ends: "His trophies hang around him, and the cloud of his odor is a chariot in itself," which for its right proportions, its simplicity of expression, its order and timing, and the freshness of its observation makes one want to say: He has not seen a horse who has not read this...

...She came upon her way of seeing things years ago...

...How well caught, this misery of the hee-haw...

...that become in this poem so exciting: He is not literary...

...Her "style" of seeing, to which the saying is so finely fitted, has the authority, the pure and pleasing "correctness" of, say, 18th-century architecture, or early American derivations from it...

...She is predominantly an ironist, she seems to take things as they are-though one has to add that it is the strangeness of things as they are...

...too, of something else-s-ourselves...

...Thunder began to bang and bump the roof...

...By how she disposes and arranges the visible, she gets at imponderables of effect...

...Yet what gets said could not more express the glitter of the supernatural endowment, this gift of the secret rulers and lords: traveling fast as a wish, with my magic cloak of fish swerving as I swerve, following the veins, the river's long, long veins, to find the pure elixirs...

...the fellow is not able to overdo it...

...It is the significance of the insignificant she is rare and striking at-a lighting upon the accidental inconsequential that just happens to carry most of the weight of feeling...

...In "Sandpiper" she defines what is true for the bird: "No detail too small" in a vast world, at the side of the Atlantic that "drains rapidly backwards and downwards.' The bird is "finical, awkward,J in a stale of controlled panic, a student of Blake"-a bit of comedy here about the "minute particulars...

...There is Manuelzinho's donkey, Formosa, "who brays like a pump gone dry...

...There is a paragraph about a horse being shoed that begins: "His harness hangs loose like a man's suspenders one of his legs is doubled up in an improbable, affectively polite way...

...It is a good taste (taste, that wisdom of the artist, as someone has said), that cannot seem to go false...

...There is nothing of the romantic dialectic in this book...

...Directly after mass...

...a kind of ballad, the speaker is a primitive (from a remote Amazonian village), a true naif, and it is beautifully right, as the poem proves it so, that "he" should make his equations of the marvelous with just what he knows, the commonplaces...

...Much of its power lies in the exact notation of details, in the clean way they are picked out and kept in place, so that every detail stays just where it must and nothing blurs, or collides...

...Here is how she hears thunder: "Personal and spiteful as a neighbor's child...

...Most of these poems show just how beautifully she gets away with taking every chance...

...he is preoccupied, and then-the outright declaration: "Poor bird, he is obsessed...

...What remains is a pure emotion of being, of incident given its laden significance because at the back of this richly various Arcady of a Nova Scotian village full of remarkable animals, kind neighbors and customs is a great trouble...

...The intent searching out of the eye is notably in the poems of course...

...Having one of the least conventional points of view, it is her strength to make the freshness seem inevitable, a something she also makes "come off" by that "specialization of sensibility"-style...

...The mad exactness of the notation is nearly always both disturbing and exciting because it is so purified...

...It is one of her best poems, and in it, as in many others, a double effect is obtained, a meaning over the meaning, and, in this case, a vision of reality and of necessity wonderfully chilling...

...came...

...This world of a summer seen through a child's knowing and not knowing, intent ignorance and awareness-how fairly the proportions are kept and the degrees of being little in a large world...

...She elicits a beauty without beautiful words or bountiful sentiments...

...She knows where to put the touch for the feeling...

...Deliberate, so civilized that it can afford to conceal it, astutely firm and grounded in its metres, it is as if the style of looking and feeling had become so essentially the grain of the poet's especial speech ways that artfulness seems like the most pristine naturalness...

...No more is the alively idiomatic language enacting his tuned-down but total dedication to the river spirit, Luandinha, who when he meets her under the river, is "in elegant white satin.,' with her big eyes green and goldi like the lights on river steamers...

...The tensions between such innocence, such kindness, and such lostness create a painful delight in a memorable way...

...tiny as nails and glinting.,' in creaking armor...

...The child's pleasure in the blacksmith's mythical forge and the horse who comes to be shoed, the child's pride and pleasure in the epic event each day of marching Nellie, the cow, through town to pasture, the trip to the candy store with its Dickensian goddess of sweets, "broad and fat"-it is all given to us as if memory had totally remembered and been transferred onto the page...

...Or, in "Squatter's Children": Their laughter spreads effulgence in the thunderheads, weak ftashes of inquiry direct as is the puppy's bark...

...Rhythmically she often underplays it to arrive at the offhand effects that can be haunting and which so nicely counterpoint the erratic-idiosyncratic about which she can be so humorous or sad-gay (as in "Manners," a poem about a vanished code of gentle behavior...

...The wrongness, the vibrations of a scream (like Edvard Munch's Cry), ring this story round...

...And what did they do...

...In "The Riverman...

...His beak is focussed...

...There are the aunts, the grandmother, the inevitable dressmaker "crawling around and around on her knees eating pins as Nebuchadnezzar had crawled eating grass," and there is the nearly invisible one, the one no one dares quite look at because something is wrong...

...Always on the move, "looking for something, something, something...

...a glistening armadillo left the scene...

...Resemblances are seized over and over in this not magical, magical local, hard-headed way...

...There is, for example, the erratic filling station: Oh but it is dirty...

...The quality of this story is the sober, "innocent," compressed calm with which it is told...

...The simplest things are given their day, for the day is a child's day and what is seen is seen as if through a child's eye, with a child's fierce religious delight in things and a child's semimagical sense of the profound mystery of the being of things...

...She is a poet whose art is in delicate substantiality, in veracious firmness, the clearness that creates invisible overtones...

...Nor is the self and its myths the prime subject...

...It is a quality always Bishop's own and of which she is a master...

...He is himself, a sandpiper, but an anxious example...

...each out to catch an Indian for himself,-/ those maddening little women who kept calling.' This kind of dry sight rarely abandons her...

...He couldn't tell you which...

...discreet, and yet rash...

...The world is a mist...

...The child's joy in the "sacred details" all move against this sorry darkness...

...ON POETRY By Jean Garrigue Elizabeth Bishop's School I n questions of Travel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 95 pp., $3.95) Elizabeth Bishop's first book of poems since 1955, she includes a story, "In a Village,' that for its intensity and restraint is a masterpiece...

...they ripped away into the hanging fabric...

...The world is uniquely minute and vast and clear...

...Objective, she usually dramatizes her visuals, there is always an action of some sort around which the textures cluster...

...In "Brazil, January 1. 1502," that study of a "tapestried landscape," there are the lines: "Just so the Christians, hard as nails...

...It happens also that she is usually there to imagine it when odd things happen, when the owl's nest catches on fire and "Hastily, all alone...

...Many of these poems are set in Brazil, where Miss Bishop has lived for the past several years...